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Observations on Human Connection & Contribution

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Feeling: Observations related to feelings

#129: Yearning for what we already have

(Renewed awareness, continued. Read related observation here.)

The first city I lived in outside of India was Los Angeles, California (L.A.). Until then, I had only experienced in-person sense stimuli in an Indian context. The concoction of smells, sights, sounds, touch, and taste all came from the culture I was raised in. While I often delighted in the bounty my culture offered, it became intimately known to me and I stopped reacting to every stimuli like I might have as a child.

When I came to L.A., my senses felt heighted like they had never been before as an adult. All at once, I encountered real life sense stimuli from a culture that evolved differently. It was sometimes hard to parse out why I was experiencing what I was. For example, I noticed that some homes and buildings had a distinct smell. It felt old and comforting; like the smell of wood from a long time ago that mixed with the bright L.A. sunshine and the crisp air. I loved those days when the old and new mixed up in my body.

When I moved away from L.A., I stopped smelling that specific smell in my everyday. Miami, Florida felt like a newer or different build somehow and the climate was different. Sometimes I’d encounter that familiar smell in old bookstores or during travel. Then I moved to Seattle, Washington. Also a different climate compared to L.A. but abundant with old structures. I smelled that smell a lot more, and when I started living in a 118-year old cottage, I was enveloped in it daily.

Then I got acclimatized, just like I had to all the Indian stimuli. The smell was so present in my everyday that I stopped noticing it. This is normal and called Olfactory Adaptation*. I was recently away for almost a month and that smell hit me so hard the minute I opened my front door. But now I’ve lost it again. I’m slathered in it everyday but can’t smell it. I notice it a little when I step out for the day and come back inside. But a few hours aren’t always enough to heighten my noticing. That level of presence happens when I get completely plucked out and then re-embedded again in my context.

If adaptation is built into our biology and I can only smell our house when I go away, what else do I crave that I already have? And how might I regain my sensitivity to it?

“Forever – is composed of Nows –
‘Tis not a different time –
Except for Infiniteness –
And Latitude of Home –

From this – experienced Here –
Remove the Dates – to These –
Let Months dissolve in further Months –
And Years – exhale in Years –”

― Emily Dickinson, American poet

* Adaptation is a common feature of all sensory systems. It helps organisms maintain sensitivity to new stimuli while being able to respond to new or changing ones.

Olfactory adaptation, also known as olfactory fatigue, is the temporary inability to smell a particular odor after being exposed to it for a long time. Some characteristics of olfactory adaptation:

  • Elevated odor thresholds: People are less responsive to odors after adaptation.
  • Reduced responsiveness: The decrease in responsiveness depends on the concentration of the odor and how long someone is exposed to it.

An example of olfactory adaptation is when the smell of food is strong when you first walk into a room, but fades after a few minutes.

#124: Beating up on past self is easy, and unhelpful

Learnings from momentum, failure, and recovery
(Read the first two in this series here and here)

When we fail at something we care about, it’s easy to fall into a blame-vortex. We look for someone to cast doubt on. When this accusatory gaze turns inwards, we invariably blame our past self for messing things up. I certainly did when I failed recently; I blamed my past self from a decade ago. I’m noticing that I frequently do this. I am often frustrated with my past self, for not doing this or that thing when she could have. I constantly chide her for not having her shit together. Sometimes this past self is recent, from the month or week prior.

This time I also examined my current self and current life. The present-day self came across as a work-in-progress and the present-day life, a complex web of things. Always evolving, always in the process of becoming the next iteration, and never fully where I’d like it to be. I’d like to try some things out, and I know I will in the future when the time is right. So if life feels messy now and I’m not ready for some things, it was messy in the past too and I wasn’t ready to give certain things a shot because of valid reasons.

When I try something later in life than I or culture imagine, it’s because that is usually the first point in time I feel resourced enough to attempt this thing; given the unique way my life is unfolding. 

Then why does my mind keep harping about this magical past self? Who does it imagine her to be? There was no magical past self with all her ducks in a row.

With this honest realization, I see my psyche start loosening its grip on my throat and self-compassion flows. The focus shifts from blame to learning from this experience of failure. I scan my present to see what I might be holding back from trying right now, and whether this holding back is actually wise or fear based. With this knowledge, I can build capacity and skill to try what I want to try, and learn from what didn’t come to pass.

The longer I live, the more past selves there are to be frustrated at. But there is no pristine past life and no magical past self to blame. 

“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”— Marcel Proust, French novelist

#119: The leaking faucet, unlocked door, and boiling kettle

My bathroom faucet has two knobs, one for hot and another for cold. On a particularly busy day, I rushed out of the bathroom and didn’t turn off one of the knobs fully. I came back later to running water that was more than just a minor trickle. I was disappointed in the waste I had contributed to and surprised by my lack of attention.

Then another day, my husband (Tim) left our primary key fob hanging at the lock on our front door. His hands were full so he left the key in the lock intending to come right back out to grab it. Meanwhile, I locked the door from the inside. We realized what had transpired after a couple of hours. The key fob had all our keys: the house, garage, car and mailbox. This was a big deal because we’ve personally seen an uptick and consistency in petty crime since Covid—stolen mail, packages, garbage cans, and most recently a smashed car window.

This last example is the most recent. We were stepping out for a walk when I felt a nudge to go back inside the house and check the stove. I found one of the burners on at low flame. We had just wrapped up brunch and Tim meant to make a second round of coffee in our moka pot but reduced the flame when he got interrupted. It went unseen by both of us.

After these events I became hyper-aware of turning off faucets and burners after use, and ensuring keys weren’t left hanging on external-facing locks. I was very tuned-in to the potential of harm from each of these scenarios. I knew that countless other random things can happen and do, but the ones I fixated on and learned from were those that happened to me.

I see this tendency in all of us and even for the bigger things in life. I knew a person who had almost drowned in her teens and had been on a life-long journey to overcome her fear of water. Another friend had difficult experiences in foster care and hadn’t seen healthy examples of family life growing up, so she chose to not have kids. Yet another highly competent surgeon friend was publicly brutalized by her boss even during intense surgeries, so she’s working on making medicine more humane for patients and providers. I have repeatedly experienced unexpected and out of turn deaths. This created an outsized fear of losing my loved ones and a heightened awareness of our limited time on earth. My experiences have shaped how I value human relationships and the work I’m choosing to do moving forward by centering relationality in my vocation.

There are countless human experiences and we can’t have them all. We are designed to tune into and learn from our leaky faucets, our unlocked doors and our boiling kettles. Experience is the primary tool for learning and once we embrace our own painful experiences fully, they become gateways to see another more completely. Difficult experiences may not be life’s weapon against us, they might be its most potent growth, connection and empathy tool. 

“Tears water our growth.”— William Shakespeare, playwright and poet

#115: Who we become on the sidelines of conflict

I’m part of many different professional tidepools, each with a group chat on Signal or Whatsapp. The Israel-Gaza conflict has surfaced in these spaces over the past month with layers of aches and perspectives. The personal and collective histories like a messy bundle of electrical wires: inextricably enmeshed and full of charge.

While Israel and Palestine isn’t the land of my ancestors, my elders experienced identity-driven geopolitical conflict alongside the fear, anger, hate and violence it generates. Their forceful expulsion from their birthland is full of stories of slaughter. I was also raised in a beautifully plural society and have experienced the turmoil that sometimes rears its head in true diversity. I’ve seen the nature of individual and collective conversations we have with each other during such times.

Our first step is ususally to share and explain our side. If we are genuinely and fully met in our grief, we feel more secure stepping out further to try and understand the other side. Most conversations get stuck at the first stage because we don’t typically acknowledge another’s pain in public (or private) discourse. We also shy away from acknowledgement because it invites action of some sort; which may be unclear, hard, or even impossible.

So the spaces for shared sense-making—where people bring in their deepest emotion, truest thoughts and questions, with a desire to shape a healthier future—are rare. This shared sense-making is hard enough face to face with people we love and issues we have known about all our lives. It’s even harder in group chats or social media with people and issues we know little about.

Although we all sense that group chats are a choppy tool for perspective sharing and sense making, we have the constraints and tools that we have so we engage. And like most spaces, a few voices step into the circle to share, some with more comfort and assertion than others. Whether we are inside the circle or silent on the periphery, we listen and digest. We learn about human nature and our own nature by coming to terms with our comfort, discomfort and boundaries. We gain a sense of how we like to learn and engage. We create perspectives about ourselves, people groups, and whole cultures. Often without realizing, we veer towards hope, helplessness or cynicism. All these become muscle memory.

Then one day down the line, even if we stand quietly in this conversation, we will step inside some other circle and share our thoughts. We might do this with nuance or binaries, with an attitude of sensing or ripping apart another’s perspective. One thing is for sure, how we behave when we enter that circle in the future will be guided by who we are becoming while on the sidelines today.

“At our best, we serve as inadvertent triggers for each other’s eventual illumination.”— Mark Nepo, Poet

PS: This is a good one about not having a hot take on everything, which forces us to have a definitive stance on issues when first a posture of learning and inquiry is better suited— Pick a Side. Pick a Side. Pick a Side. Now.

#108: The emotional dust of creation

We don’t create things all at once, fully formed. Whether it’s an organization, a community, a tiny human or ourselves, creation takes time and the build is always unexpected. That’s a big reason why we subconsciously hold back from creating anything new: it feels risky to invest emotion and effort and not even have the guarantee that this thing we want will actually happen, or happen the way we want it to.

If we make a plan before starting (which is always a good idea), it’ll orient us in the right direction and help take suitable steps, but it likely won’t reflect the nuanced terrain we’ll actually walk. That’s because neither the terrain nor our creation remains static. Both respond to our actions and the events in our larger environment. Similarly, we ourselves respond and change; what we thought last week or last month will shift a bit when we engage in the work. Finally, we never build anything alone. Ever. There are others right next to us co-creating and going through the same push and pull of change and creation. So we’re changing, our creation is changing, our co-creators are changing and the environment is changing. This happens simultaneously and repeatedly. This dynamic is called emergence, and it asks for emotional flexibility. 

The work of creating something new is less like driving a self-driving Tesla on a traffic-free highway, and more like walking a dusty backroad full of brambles alongside others. It’s never a cool and collected experience of just sitting back and arriving. We all get scratched, stumble, bump into each other and kick up dust as we walk.

To make matters harder, we regularly pass through invisible gates that change the scenery and the terrain. What we did before needs to be adjusted in unexpected ways. If we were too absorbed in the work of creating, we may not even realize that we passed a gate. That’s when the emotional dust peaks―we all scramble to make sense of the new terrain, run furiously into the brambles and each other, kick up more dust, and make it harder to see things clearly. 

Knowing this, what if:

  • In addition to drawing maps, we prepare for that dusty and brambly trail with unseen gates.
  • Instead of a heroic solo journey, we note others who walk besides us.
  • Our commitment isn’t to one specific outcome but to staying on the dusty path. We develop resilience, integrity, and might I add―joy, so none of us opt-out in favor of the cushy Tesla path.
  • We invest time in creating trust: holding a hand, mending a wound, or offering a sip of water on this twisty path.
  • Most importantly, we create the capacity to be ok with emotional dust as we blind each other with it.

“The mighty oak was once an acorn that stood its ground.”― English Proverb, Author Unknown 

It may not happen.
If it happens, it wont happen the way you imagined.
If it happens, it’ll be its own thing: emergent and separate from you, uncontrollable by anyone.
Bringing it to life will dent you and others in unseen places.

So, why do it?
Because you came with these fertile seeds.
And if you hold back, first the seeds will wither…then you.
― A little ditty, by Suparna